Top Money Saving Tips...

For Food Lovers

If you love your food (and let’s face it, who doesn’t?) and you’re on a budget, you need to be able to make the most of what you have available. There are plenty of tips and tricks to make your food last longer and go further, and the following should get you thinking:

- When you buy a chicken for a roast dinner, use the cold meat for sandwiches the next day. Once all the meat is used, boil the carcass for an hour and strip it of any remaining scraps of meat. Add some vegetables, cubed potatoes and stock cubes and simmer for an hour to make a hearty chicken soup for next to nothing.

- When making a beef casserole, use less meat and add lentils and more vegetables to bulk out the meal. Lentils are a good standby to have in your cupboard; they can be added to stews, soups and casseroles, and are nutritious and filling as well.

- Never be without a tin of baked beans in your cupboard. I add them into my homemade Cottage Pie and use less mince, and it gives a lovely tomatoey flavour and makes the meal more filling… for less money.

- If you use tinned tuna in sandwiches, mix it in with chopped onion and salad cream or mayo to bulk it out. You could also use chopped cucumber. If you have a food mixer, mix the tuna and mayo together for a few seconds before adding the other ingredients. This will give you a pate consistency that will go a lot further, as it’s more spreadable. The same tip also holds true for egg mayonnaise.

- Make salads more filling by adding some cooked cold rice or pasta. These can both be bought cheaply in bulk, and it’s worth doing because they can form a cheap base to a meal, or be added as an extra ingredient to make a meal more filling.

- Instead of keeping your bread in a bread bin, freeze it as soon as you buy it, and remove slices as you need them. Once separated the slices defrost in minutes, and it prevents unused bread going mouldy within days of being bought.

- Take advantage of special deals when you go shopping. Most food can be frozen or stored to use at a later date, and bulk buys can be far cheaper.

by Allison Whitehead

0 members like this